1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to systems and methods to process royalties based on existing information as soon as it becomes available. Sales records are processed on a transaction basis rather than in batch mode. This process also allows correction of information retroactively, rather than delaying the entire processing of the information.
2. Description of Related Art
Royalty management for audio and video content products is a very complex area. Recent years have witnessed a tremendous growth of audio and video product publishers, with new product labels springing up and old labels being acquired. These factors alone have made the management of royalties extremely complicated, but furthermore, the volume of product transactions has increased greatly and is expected to explode with the advent of new media and delivery methods, such as product file downloads, pay-per-listen, pay-per-view, etc. As a result, current batch-type processing of royalty earning calculations is badly bottlenecked and soon will be so inadequate to handle the volume of transactions that it will be unusable. If it takes more than 24 hours to process a batch that means that the batch cannot be processed daily and thus must be processed less frequently, typically weekly. And once the run time for a batch process exceeds seven days, the batch may only be processed once a month, and the resulting data will so out of date that it is useless. In particular, royalty data that is older than one month does not allow publishers to view sales activity within the month. The resulting data has only historic value, which makes it very hard for publishers and sales forces to react to changes in acquisitions and royalty income. An additional problem is that royalty rates often depend on the volume of either transactions, dollars, or both, and therefore, the more delays in the processing of this information, the more convoluted and problematic the batch processes are. Thus, the delays will be even greater.
Thus, a need exists for a new shared royalty platform (SRP) that allows real-time processing of royalties, based on existing information as soon as it becomes available.